After playing Starfield I don't really have any expectations for Bethesda to deliver on anything interesting anymore. The progression from Oblivion to Starfield has been one of becoming less like a small shop with character willing for its developers to take big risks with unique and intricate features, and more of trying to be a generic AAA studio that prefers predictable blandness. I don't think you can really hope that they'll magically return to making games the way they did 20 years ago.
They seem to now be under the mistaken impression that radiant AI is to get more content out of the game by implementing infinite permutations of simple quests, and that customers will think X things permuted Y ways is X*Y content and not just X+Y content. But the purpose of radiant AI was, I think, to make the world feel alive and even unique. Which means I really shouldn't even see every x in X or every y in Y.
If you want an interesting implementation of the same concepts as in Radiant AI I recommend checking out Dwarf Fortress. Every dwarf fortress world is essentially an entire history of thousands of radiant AI interactions up until you enter it, at which point your adventurer/fort becomes part of the world and continues the radiant interactions with its civilizations/wildlife/monsters/etc.
I think DF is probably the ideal existing game to considering adding LLM-characters and conversation to as a drop-in augmentation. DF already has the simulation and generation of realistic characters and stories working, but unfortunately it's very formulaic to interact with it as an adventurer. In that case the game actually is quite "alive" already, just without a voice.
Night_Thastus 22 minutes ago [-]
To me, Starfield is a massive admission that either the developers don't understand what made their previous games work - or that no one will step in at a top level and prevent them breaking that core.
The modern TES games have been all about environmental storytelling, exploration, combat and crafting. All else is secondary.
Whether you like that focus or not is up to you, but that's the draw of games like Skyrim and FO4.
But Starfield completely broke it. They wanted hundreds of planets to explore, but the only practical way to do that is procedural generation. No one wants to explore procedural spaces. There's never anything interesting in them. You can't do environmental storytelling because that requires a human hand.
Due to engine limitations, making all the travel seamless was also completely impractical.
So instead of seeing a location and going "Oh man, I want to go there!", then just walking there encountering distractions on the way...it's Loading screen -> Loading Screen -> Loading screen -> Generic planet with nothing interesting to see.
How no one at a top level said "this can't work, the game's concept is bad, start over" is baffling. No one had a vision at the top level for how the game was supposed to work - or that vision was just wrong.
If Bethesda can't understand the fundamentals of their own best-selling game, I don't see how they can make a sequel.
ksynwa 32 minutes ago [-]
Yes. IMO Starfield's biggest failure is in the creative department. It is not interesting at all (for me) in terms of things like writing and voice acting etc. It is not a technical problem that can solved by innovative game mechanics like a roided up version of radiant AI (whatever that is).
Games like RDR2 and Witcher 3 left such a mark on me becauss they had bold personalities. Starfield in comparison feels like corporate memphis despite a nice Nasapunk foundation.
jasonjmcghee 35 minutes ago [-]
Maybe through a mod. Hard to imagine Tarn would have any interest involving LLMs.
Der_Einzige 18 minutes ago [-]
The overwhelming majority of folks even here will not play DF. If you want them to play a DF like game, talk about rimworld please!
dedicate 20 minutes ago [-]
I don't actually want to have a deep, philosophical conversation with a blacksmith.
I just want to see that blacksmith close up shop early because he's feuding with the town guard, or give me a discount because his daughter just won the local archery competition. I want a world that reacts to itself, not just to me.
The goal shouldn't be to make NPCs that can pass the Turing test, but to make a world that feels like it has a pulse.
deadbabe 5 minutes ago [-]
It doesn’t need to be a deep philosophical conversation. You could be striking up a “buy now pay later” business deal or asking him to produce a specific type of equipment according to your specifications, etc.
Legend2440 19 minutes ago [-]
>I don't actually want to have a deep, philosophical conversation with a blacksmith.
You didn’t read the article, that’s not what Radiant AI did. This is from twenty years ago and has nothing to do with LLMs.
ednite 1 hours ago [-]
Interesting read. Got me thinking, I’d love to see what happens when modern AI meets open world simulation. Not just prettier graphics, but actual reasoning NPCs. Imagine arguing with a World of Warcraft innkeeper about the price of ale. Priceless.
Dzugaru 44 minutes ago [-]
Not possible, because can't be guardrailed with 100% accuracy. You'll ask it something outside of the Warcraft world (e.g. US politics), and it'll happily oblige. I imagine NPCs will generate really weird immersion breaking stuff even if you cannot freeform interact with them anyway.
Not to mention the current token cost.
brookst 24 minutes ago [-]
I’m not at all sure of this. You can use classifiers, fine tuning, and prompting to mitigate the issue both on user input and model output. And you’d probably want a bunch of fine tuning anyway to get their voice right.
Al-Khwarizmi 38 minutes ago [-]
You can do that also while playing a traditional tabletop RPG. Players typically don't do it because why would they ruin immersion?
I understand that in multiplayer with strangers it would be a problem because you could affect other players' experiences, but in a single-player game I don't see this as a big issue, as long as the NPC doesn't spontaneously bring immersion-breaking topics into the conversation without the player starting it (which I suppose could be achieved with a suitable system prompt and some fine-tuning on in-lore text).
If it's the player that wants to troll the game and break immersion by "jailbreaking" the NPCs, it's on them, just like if they use a cheat code and make the game trivial.
dleeftink 36 minutes ago [-]
Write a couple of lore books, in-universe cyclopedia, some character sheets and exclusively train on them. Maybe some out-of-game lore for cross-over universes!
keyringlight 6 minutes ago [-]
The question that poses to me is the quantity of writing you need for training before you can reasonably expect a generation system to produce something new and interesting, however much work on the right knowledge is in the right place, and is worth the costs for how you expect the player to interact with the game beyond the manual work.
I doubt there's telemetry in the elder scrolls games, but I'd love to know how many go around the world exploring everything the characters have to say, or reading all the books. How many get the lore in secondary media, wikis or watching a retelling or summary on youtube. On a certain level it's important they're there as an opt-in method to convey the 'secondary' world lore to the player without a "sit down and listen" info dump, plus give the impression it was written by someone so these objects would would exist organically in the world or certain characters would talk about those topics, but I wonder how much of the illusion would still be there if it was just each book having a title.
ileonichwiesz 10 minutes ago [-]
Is that feasible? I was under the impression that fully training an LLM requires untold mountains of data, way more than a game dev company could reasonably create.
otabdeveloper4 5 minutes ago [-]
> Not to mention the current token cost.
Games is one place where running local LLM's is a no-brainer.
varelse 6 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
anonzzzies 43 minutes ago [-]
and the place where hallucinations can be a feature instead of a bug
thrance 35 minutes ago [-]
I enjoy getting my ale at the click of a button, and keep my arguing capabilities for stranger online.
There may be a place for AI driven games but there is literally no reason to shove it everywhere. Pre-written dialogue is much more enjoyable to engage with on the long term, contrasted with having to think about phrasing for an NPC that spouts generic fantasy speak.
Mistletoe 1 hours ago [-]
When will we get games that actually do do this? It’s one of the things I’m actually excited about with AI.
varelse 11 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 15:33:31 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
They seem to now be under the mistaken impression that radiant AI is to get more content out of the game by implementing infinite permutations of simple quests, and that customers will think X things permuted Y ways is X*Y content and not just X+Y content. But the purpose of radiant AI was, I think, to make the world feel alive and even unique. Which means I really shouldn't even see every x in X or every y in Y.
If you want an interesting implementation of the same concepts as in Radiant AI I recommend checking out Dwarf Fortress. Every dwarf fortress world is essentially an entire history of thousands of radiant AI interactions up until you enter it, at which point your adventurer/fort becomes part of the world and continues the radiant interactions with its civilizations/wildlife/monsters/etc.
I think DF is probably the ideal existing game to considering adding LLM-characters and conversation to as a drop-in augmentation. DF already has the simulation and generation of realistic characters and stories working, but unfortunately it's very formulaic to interact with it as an adventurer. In that case the game actually is quite "alive" already, just without a voice.
The modern TES games have been all about environmental storytelling, exploration, combat and crafting. All else is secondary.
Whether you like that focus or not is up to you, but that's the draw of games like Skyrim and FO4.
But Starfield completely broke it. They wanted hundreds of planets to explore, but the only practical way to do that is procedural generation. No one wants to explore procedural spaces. There's never anything interesting in them. You can't do environmental storytelling because that requires a human hand.
Due to engine limitations, making all the travel seamless was also completely impractical.
So instead of seeing a location and going "Oh man, I want to go there!", then just walking there encountering distractions on the way...it's Loading screen -> Loading Screen -> Loading screen -> Generic planet with nothing interesting to see.
How no one at a top level said "this can't work, the game's concept is bad, start over" is baffling. No one had a vision at the top level for how the game was supposed to work - or that vision was just wrong.
If Bethesda can't understand the fundamentals of their own best-selling game, I don't see how they can make a sequel.
Games like RDR2 and Witcher 3 left such a mark on me becauss they had bold personalities. Starfield in comparison feels like corporate memphis despite a nice Nasapunk foundation.
I just want to see that blacksmith close up shop early because he's feuding with the town guard, or give me a discount because his daughter just won the local archery competition. I want a world that reacts to itself, not just to me.
The goal shouldn't be to make NPCs that can pass the Turing test, but to make a world that feels like it has a pulse.
You didn’t read the article, that’s not what Radiant AI did. This is from twenty years ago and has nothing to do with LLMs.
Not to mention the current token cost.
I understand that in multiplayer with strangers it would be a problem because you could affect other players' experiences, but in a single-player game I don't see this as a big issue, as long as the NPC doesn't spontaneously bring immersion-breaking topics into the conversation without the player starting it (which I suppose could be achieved with a suitable system prompt and some fine-tuning on in-lore text).
If it's the player that wants to troll the game and break immersion by "jailbreaking" the NPCs, it's on them, just like if they use a cheat code and make the game trivial.
I doubt there's telemetry in the elder scrolls games, but I'd love to know how many go around the world exploring everything the characters have to say, or reading all the books. How many get the lore in secondary media, wikis or watching a retelling or summary on youtube. On a certain level it's important they're there as an opt-in method to convey the 'secondary' world lore to the player without a "sit down and listen" info dump, plus give the impression it was written by someone so these objects would would exist organically in the world or certain characters would talk about those topics, but I wonder how much of the illusion would still be there if it was just each book having a title.
Games is one place where running local LLM's is a no-brainer.
There may be a place for AI driven games but there is literally no reason to shove it everywhere. Pre-written dialogue is much more enjoyable to engage with on the long term, contrasted with having to think about phrasing for an NPC that spouts generic fantasy speak.